[...] down the high-street in the main European countries without seeing a 1-Euro netbook deal (the ASUS 901Go being a particularly interesting one) but as far as I know, its the first time we’ve seen a popular netbook get the 3G treatment [...]

[...] available in other countries. The device is free but the monthly charge is 25 pounds. I highly recommended this item a few months ago and I stick by it. If you want one of the more mobile netbook options, this is the [...]

In a declining economy – and rest assured that the marked analysts where not taken by surprise, the decline was well evident over a year and a half ago – with a marked that has been saturated with electronics during the last couple of years, a product like the netbook would be a natural attempt at keeping sales up. For example, a significant part of Asus’ revenue actually stems from the netbook market – a marked that dates not even a year back.

It would furthermore be wrong to assume that margins are low on these machines. It is more of a reinvention of a market that has been very much driven by the top range products. This cannot be expected to continue during an economical decline, and while it probably will partially slow down development, it is also likely to reangle the development efforts towards a new type of products.

I think that the reason is simple: Asus saw something that we all had been wanting for a while, when they released the 701: A small cheap laptop without the performance but with the functionality. For some reason, the hierarchy used to be completely one dimensional – more functionality meant higher performance and higher prices. We are seeing that paradigm being overthrown, with really cheap full sized laptops with 3G-connectivity.

No, this is the best thing that could have happened to a market where marked strategy was more important than what consumers really wanted. The netbook marked stands for the opposite – you have to listed if you are just going to include the most important things into a product.

tv tuner for laptop…

Is there any way I can subscribe to your blog? Thanks!…

it seems the 901Go and (new?) 1000HGo will be soon available in Italy at 399 euro:

http://www.tim.it/consumer/c365/i3329/o76476/prodotto.do

and 479 euro:

http://www.tim.it/consumer/c365/i3329/o76670/prodotto.do

respectively both with HSUPA.

FC

It seems that in Italy this will be available end october, both as an alone package and as a contract based purchase (100 hours per month).
No price right now, even if they say the price should be lower than 400 euro.

c

Calling a netbook botton feeder is stupid. Why, Atom is not fast enough? I run 20 large-photo panorama stitch on my netbook. The new Macbooks are out and all I can see is the 4.5 lb figure. Too heavy. It’s not about the price.

If they have left over product, because of the high volume that they can sell, then they FORCE the manufacturer to take back what they don’t sell. With the numbers they can push, the manufacturer will make this deal just to get the product on the big chain store shelves.

The specialist has to sell SERVICES and SUPPORT, and add-ons. If I were in the specialist market I would look at doing LinuxMCE as a product that could be “controlled and interfaced with” a netbook or UMPC. If you have not seen the video on LinuxMCE, then google it and the video will be in the first 4 or 5 in the list that google gives you.

A UMPC, Cell Phone, or Netbook would multi-task on the sofa or arm chair, while browsing, doing email, at the same time could be used as a “control device” for LinuxMCE… and with 3G (to use netbook, UMPC, or cell phone as remote security notification device as LinuxMCE has a home or business security feature built-in so see the video as to how it is done), well there seems to be no limit to the different options that LinuxMCE has today, and because geeks are building it, you can email them with additional feature requests (or do it yourself as the software is GPL based software).

Specialist retail stores need to focus on the entire package.
I know one specialist store that does computers (ASUS shop) that refused to even handle the EeePC due to not being able to afford doing RMA support based on the margins that they could see on what little volume they could project doing (they did business desktops and servers mostly). They didn’t even want EeePC in the house at all to distract them.

That’s basically whats happening with the carriers. They sell the device at zero cost to make monthly on data plans and get customer on their books for further advertising and offers. The difference with the carriers is that they are worse than bubble-pack sales as they have the volume and sales process to be able offer the latest products in a 12-18month cycle.
This makes it even harder for specialist resellers!

S.